


competitive fucking horticulture

by wrishwrosh



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Character Study, Gardens & Gardening, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 09:18:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12980961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrishwrosh/pseuds/wrishwrosh
Summary: Jack, surprise me and don't go to the NHL. Surprise me and do, like, competitive fucking horticulture.Or, Jack becomes a gardener.





	competitive fucking horticulture

**Author's Note:**

> this was written in a fugue state last night and this afternoon, it is completely unedited, i had two exams today, please enjoy.

 

Jack just gets tired sometimes. He likes peace and quiet. He doesn’t need it desperately or anything, and he doesn’t get a ton of it living in the Haus, which is fine. He likes it, though. He’s fine as is, and he isn’t a hermit despite Shitty’s occasional accusations, but he wouldn’t mind a little more peace and quiet. 

He was raised in a collection of sedate, gated neighborhoods in houses set back from the street by privacy hedges and long driveways and stately yards. He tells people he grew up in Pittsburgh and Montreal because most don’t recognize the names of the suburbs, but he’s never really been a city-dweller. The busiest place he’s ever spent more than a week or two at a time is Rimouski, which is no bustling metropolis.

Objectively, he knows that Samwell is also pretty slow. It’s a college town, though, so there’s always cars driving by and sirens going off and people yelling on the sidewalk in the early hours of the morning. Before this, though, he had two years to kick around in his parents’ big, quiet house in Westmount, getting used to just the sound of his own thoughts and the furnace turning on and off. Samwell grates a little bit sometimes, after that.

He’d be able to buy a house like the one he grew up in, an acre and a half of yard with old growth trees and no street noise, in any one of the cities looking to sign him. He doesn’t want to get arrogant, but none of the teams courting him are going to skimp on his rookie contract or his signing bonus. But it might look weird, a single guy like him buying a big family home in the suburbs right away with no family to put in it. Plus, it seems wasteful when he wants the quiet more than the square footage. He’ll be expected to get a trendy downtown condo, close to bars and clubs and other places he doesn’t particularly want to go.

There’s a reason they don’t build NHL franchises in small towns or wilderness areas. But sometimes Jack wishes they did.

+

It’s after midnight, and the lacrosse party across the street is still going strong, and the soothing cricket sounds playing off the white noise app on his phone aren’t doing anything to stop the feeling that his bones are going to itch right out of his skin. Jack is tired. Jack is really goddamn tired, so he opens his laptop and digs up the resume he threw together at some point sophomore year, and he submits that resume to a seasonal gardener position at the New England Coastal Botanical Gardens.

He always liked the Biodome growing up. How different can it be?

+

Jack graduates without much fanfare and, three days later, drives north and moves into a small employee apartment at the Gardens. The place they're putting him up is small and shabby. The radiator rattles and the only air conditioning is an ancient box fan propped up in the corner of the kitchenette and the front window looks out on a sloping lawn. Jack loves it. 

He's a trainee or an apprentice or something, he can't remember what's on his official paperwork. But the upshot is he gets housing and temporary supervision for now, and continued employment after that if he doesn't fuck up too badly.

They give him a day's grace period to get settled before he reports to the employees-only greenhouse, which apparently doubles as an office. His new boss, a broad shouldered woman in her fifties named Kathleen, meets him there. She looks him up and down, eyes lingering on his obviously brand-new work boots, and asks him what his major was. When he says history, she just snorts and hands him a rake and a baseball cap with the New England Coastal logo on it.

+

He kissed Bitty before he left, following the vague suggestion of his father. Bob has been nothing but bracingly supportive, if somewhat confused, since Jack said he wasn't going to the NHL. They went through enough family counseling after Jack’s first flukey attempt to break into professional hockey that now his parents are just happy he's sober and reasonably stable. Most of the time, Jack is very glad that the bar isn't higher.

He knows it isn't likely, but he hopes that soon other people will stop caring what he does. He knows some people are still waiting breathlessly for Jack Zimmermann to sign with their team, but he’s familiar with hockey media. After dropping out of the public eye at the peak of his personal news cycle twice, he doesn't expect a third chance. Maybe a follow up in a few years: “Remember Jack Zimmermann? What The Fuck Happened There?”

All this is to say, Jack kissed Bitty. And for the first time in his life, he might be in a position where something more can come of that.

+

Kathleen starts him off on grunt work, weeding and raking and sweeping the paths. He doesn't mind. He definitely doesn't have the knowledge to do anything more specialized yet, and the repetitive work is a little mind-numbing in a good way. It turns out hockey calluses are in a slightly different spot on his hands than rake calluses.

Kathleen comes by to check on him often. Jack would think her constant attention was a little insulting, but every time she casually points out a little fact about the care and habits of whichever plant he's working closest to. Jack appreciates these little lessons. He's never been the type to learn by doing, and he likes having the chance to turn the new information over in his head and commit it to memory.

Another bonus of his new position is that, scuffling around in the beds with his official New England Coastal hat and t shirt, he fades into the background. People ignore him like he's part of the shrubbery.

+

He’s still in one or two of the various Samwell Hockey groupchats, and all of his Hausmates send him individual, careful texts every few days. Bittle, by contrast, rarely stops texting him.

Before Jack terrified everyone in his life by dropping everything and secluding himself in a garden park, he might have thought the constant contact would be annoying. It isn’t, though. Bitty is the only person who isn’t treating him like he suffered a mental break. The little texts every hour or so about the oven are a nice reminder that life goes on.

It’s just nice to have someone to talk to. Jack is a little bit of a loner, but he’s trying not to isolate himself completely. Plus, when he leans over to take a picture of some lichen that’s kind of shaped like a rabbit and Kathleen asks who he’s always texting, Jack can say, “My boyfriend, he’s in school still.” 

+

After a few weeks spreading mulch and hauling rocks and pulling up weeds, Kathleen hands him a stack of horticulture books and tells him to take a look at the irrigation system in the south greenhouse and see if he can’t figure out why the orchids are wilting. After he rearranges some planters and flushes some tubing, Kathleen sends him on to figure out a new groundcover for the fern garden.

At night, he sits in the hot little attic apartment and reads the books she gave him. He opens the windows, but sometimes it gets so sticky that the pages stick to his fingers. He takes notes too, on plant biology and landscape aesthetics and local climate, because he trained himself into study skills the same way he trained himself into skating drills.

Sometimes Bitty skypes him. The wifi in the apartment is crappy, so their connection goes in and out, but they still manage to chat. Bitty keeps him up to date on all the Bittle-Phelps gossip, and Jack tells Bitty about plants. 

Just once, Bitty asks if he’d like to visit Georgia, maybe for the Fourth. Jack says no. He can’t take time off yet, as the most junior gardener. Bitty would be disappointed if he said so, but he doesn’t really mind. It’s good to stay in one place for a little while.

+

The last week of Bitty’s summer break, he leaves Georgia and comes up to visit Jack for a little while. Jack drives down to pick him up in Boston and they drive out of the city, past the exit for Samwell and further north, with the windows rolled down all the way to catch the sweaty late summer breeze.

When they get up to the apartment, Jack watches Bitty take it all in. The maps of Quebec and the Massachusetts coast, taped to the walls just like his room in the Haus. The horticulture books scattered across the couch where he left them last night. The muddy boots in the corner by the door, tucked away as inconspicuously as they can be when there’s no coat closet. Bitty crosses to the kitchenette and drags a finger along the edge of the counter. There’s no oven, just a hot plate and a microwave.

Bitty turns around to look at him hovering in the doorway. Jack tries not to look like he’s consciously awaiting approval, but Bitty must see it anyway. He smiles. “I like it,” he says. “Nice and quiet for you, huh?”

They have a nice visit. Jack asked Kathleen for shortened hours while his boyfriend was visiting, and she lets him duck out a little early and show up a little late. He and Bitty have a nice dinner at a little Italian restaurant in town one night and brunch at a touristy diner in the morning. Bitty makes them mug cakes in the microwave. They have sex, on the couch and in the bed. Bitty asks him for a personal tour of the gardens, and Jack gets him an employee discount on admission.

Jack finds he has an affinity for the wildflowers and the fruit trees. He’s not better at them than any of the other plots. He doesn’t have a natural talent for gardening, it’s just that the wildflower garden and the orchard are his favorite spots to work. 

The wildflowers smell nice, and Kathleen has them set up in a shady little grove with a bench in the middle. When the gardens aren’t too crowded, that’s where he takes his breaks. The fruit trees, he likes because they’re small and beautiful, but still useful, and they remind him of Bits. 

He doesn’t say any of that out loud, because he doesn’t know how Bitty would react, but he looks at Bitty reaching up into the branches of a plum tree and he’s thinking it.

+

Jack does think occasionally about the NHL, and all the assorted might-have-beens. He doesn’t have a TV in his apartment, but he streams some preseason games on his laptop when he gets a chance. September is the tail end of the peak season at the gardens, though, and Kathleen keeps him busy. She’s teaching him to winterize the more delicate plants, and she has him occasionally talking to school groups that come through for tours.

He doesn’t have time to watch games, much less analyze the stats the way he used to with Shitty and Ransom. His mind isn’t all hockey anymore, and he’s lost enough of his conditioning that his body isn’t either.

He’s sure some of the guys still think he’s just taking another gap year and he’ll be signing with the Habs or the Pens for the 2016 season. Jack doesn’t think that anymore. Jack doesn’t know if he ever really thought that. He’s never been good with stasis.

Now, when he thinks about his future he thinks about maybe signing up for one of the landscape design classes Kathleen teaches at the community college during her spare time. He thinks about getting a good lease on a place with a real oven once winter hits and all of the seasonal renters clear out. He thinks about sticking his hands in the dirt and putting down roots.

+

The winter season is odd and quiet at the New England Coastal Botanical Gardens. The gardens close to daily visitors in mid-October and the seasonal workers leave not long after that. Jack thinks he was supposed to be a seasonal worker at some point, but Kathleen got attached to him and his ability to haul fifty pounds of fertilizer under each arm.

The gardens put on some kind of Christmas light extravaganza in December and Jack loses a couple of wildly busy weeks around American Thanksgiving stringing up thousands of feet of lights between every tree in the entire gardens. He sends Bitty a picture of the orchard all lit up. Kathleen sees the photo over his shoulder, because she’s nosier than his father sometimes.

She demands to see the rest of his portfolio, so then he has to throw together a portfolio with all the pictures of trees and leaves and the sky he’s sent to Bitty and his mother over the last few months. He throws in a few shots from the photography elective he took, although he thinks the stuff he’s done recently is actually a little better. 

Kathleen flips through it forever, than drags him up to the computer in her office and tells him to redesign New England Coastal’s promotional materials, which she made herself five years ago and hasn’t changed since. Jack had noticed that they were a little out of date, though he didn’t say anything out of tact.

It’s enough of a project for Kathleen to keep him on payroll through January. He settles in to spend the winter on Photoshop in Kathleen’s office while she sits across the desk paging through seed catalogs and scoffing at horticulture publications.

For Christmas, he sends Bitty a few jars of jam from the gardens’ gift shop. They’re homemade from the trees in the orchard.

+

Jack has a locker where he keeps his gloves along with his own personal pruning shears in multiple sizes. Kathleen took them out of his paycheck, but they’re his and his alone now. He sometimes goes out with some of the other gardeners in a bar in town, and they don’t mention when he switches to water after only one beer. He found a little public rink where they let him run some casual drills on the ice for free if he gets there right after the high school team finishes up.

He walks to work every morning and calls Bitty most nights and next spring, Kathleen is going to let him replant one of the small plots next to the Japanese garden with his own design.

His apartment is warm and quiet, and he’s pretty happy.

**Author's Note:**

> the new england coastal botanical gardens are made up, as is most of the stuff in here about both plants and actual horticultural procedure, this is based almost solely on what i would personally like a gardener job to involve after taking two exams in one day
> 
> this is brought to you by all the ways i've been procrastinating in the last week, which are as follows: due south, the sufjan stevens christmas album, and dreaming about dropping out of college to go do noble labor in the wilderness.
> 
> im wrishwrosh on tumblr as well, come say hey!


End file.
